Harvard Denies Study is a Response to Creationism

Harvard University today dismissed reports that it was stepping into the politically charged debate about the origins of life by conducting a major scientific investigation into how the world came to be.

American newspapers and the international news agency Reuters today reported that the university was planning a new research project entitled "origins of life in the universe" in a move which propelled the university into the conflict over the teaching of creationism in schools.

America is gripped by the row, which stems from moves by religious groups to campaign for schools to teach alternatives to the scientific evolutionary version of how the world came about. Some have argued for the teaching of the religious version, creationism, which argues that God created the world.

The latest move has been to have schools teach "intelligent design" a theory which argues that the world is too complex to have come about from the natural selection theory of evolution alone. The US president, George Bush, has backed the teaching of intelligent design.

The Harvard project is a cross-discipline project bringing chemists, biologists and physicists together to re-examine the scientific basis of evolutionary theory.

B D Colen, a spokesman for the university, told EducationGuardian.co.uk: "The origins of life in the universe initiative was started several years ago before questions about the existence or non-existence of some kind of intelligent design became part of the national debate and this is a long-term purely scientific exercise looking at questions about the basic chemical molecular beginnings of life."

"This is ... a stunning admission that the current theories do not explain [the origin of life], and [have] not refuted the idea that things are the product of intelligent cause," John West, a senior fellow at the Seattle-based Discovery Institute, a thinktank that backs intelligent design theory, told Reuters.